Hah! I bet some of you didn't think that I'd get around to writing up this, the last day of the festival! Well, given past experience, that's fair enough. But I've managed to claw back some free time, and I get to round out my (and your) Festival experience!
My first movie was The Order of Myths at Te Papa, about the way Mardi Gras is celebrated in Mobile, Alabama. This is the oldest continuous celebration in the States, starting several years before the founding of New Orleans. It's made slightly more complicated by the fact that there are, effectively, two Mardi Gras - one run for whites (where the only black people involved in the parade are torch-bearers, marching bands and dancers), and one for the blacks. There are two Kings and Queens of Mardi Gras elected, two sets of elaborate costumes prepared, and two parades. There is no real movement to integrate the two celebrations (there is one integrated "mystic society", and it has a grand total of one white member), but we saw the black King and Queen turn up at the coronation ball of the white King and Queen, and they were welcomed very graciously, and there seemed to be indications that the two groups might, if not integrate, acknowledge one another more.
The two groups definitely had different flavours of approach. The black celebration seemed to take itself a little less seriously, while still getting into the pomp of the thing; the white celebration was much more about the history and tradition, and many of their "mystic societies" had rules that meant that you had to be from the right sort of family to join. The white Queen's grandmother was the oldest living former Queen, and was from a wealthy landowning family; her n-th great-grandfather brought over the last slave ship to the USA, after it had been made illegal, and arranged to have it set on fire, fully loaded, to cover up the crime. The slaves that escaped the ship settled in the woods nearby, an area that is now called Africa-town.
There were plenty of indicators that there were definitely still some issues going on; one of the white Queen's court talked about how she felt a bit weird about the whole thing, and there was a scene set at a country club (white patrons, black service staff); we see this woman talking to one of the dishwashers in the kitchen (getting in the way of people trying to work), and then she goes back out the front and sits down with her mother and a bunch of other well-off white women. And very few of the blacks in Africa-town own the property that they live on; it's all leased from the family of the white Queen.
But there was the new "mystic society" that seemed to be full of beer-drinking blue-collars, who got costumed up and went out to a school for kids with developmental challenges (or whatever the right term is these days). And the black King and Queen were both school-teachers, and the kids were obviously really proud of them. And the designer of the trains for the black royalty was absolutely chuffed when the main designer for the white royalty had nice things to say about her work.
It was an interesting documentary, and I'm glad I saw it.
Speaking of ancient traditions - I'm happy to report that one of my Festival traditions was kept intact for another year, because I managed to bump into Morgue's parents at this showing. I'm sad that I didn't see more of them, but it was good to have a quick chat, get filled in about some of the movies that I've missed, and compare notes about some of the films we'd all seen.
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Then I was off to the Film Archive for Revue, a black-and-white Soviet propaganda film presented without commentary, full of news of the patriotic plays being put on by farming collectives, and how noble the young medical students choosing to go and live in the new settlements were, the way that various factories were going the extra mile and producing over quota to honour various events... and the wicked peasant woman who was feeding bread to pigs - bread, that valuable commodity! And look at her house! And owning animals by yourself, not in common! Shameful.
It was a really interesting piece of propaganda, and relatively sophisticated. For example, when they have a kid asked whether he enjoys work, rather than bursting with Soviet pride, he looks realistically (and humorously) dubious. It would have been nice to get some context for some of this, but I think that seeing it unfiltered like this was really interesting, too.
I might not watch it again, however.
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Then it was off to a very different sort of documentary - The First Saturday in May, about races, racehorses, and the people who own the racehorses. This was very much a "let me show you how this world is" sort of narrative, rather than any sort of questioning of the world or it's structures. There was nary a hint about the shady shenanigans that tends to be synonymous with the racing world - just a bunch of guys (and it was mostly guys) who are passionate about horses and racing. This was all about the personalities, and the races - getting the audience on the edge of their seats as we see these horses and trainers on the racecourse, and feel their tension and anxiety as the trainers watch a situation which they can't do anything, trying through sheer willpower to get their horse into a position that will let them compete in the Holy Grail of racing, the Kentucky Derby.
There were a lot of good little moments - a kid putting up a "Get Well Soon" sign and a bag full of carrots on the fence outside an ailing horse's stable, for example. Or the contrast of the fancy hats in one part of the Kentucky Derby, and the guys with beer bongs in the other parts. Or all the family stories, with the New York stable-guy interacting with his son, or the three sons of another manager demanding new skateboards if their horse wins. The documentary did a really good job of helping you keep track of the various horses, stables and jockeys, and is definitely one worth watching to see how to make sure a story with a large number of characters can remain distinct from each other.
I don't need to see it again, but it's a fine example of a "feel-good" doco.
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And then, the Embassy, a live orchestra, and The Freshman, a black-and-white silent comedy lampooning the then-current passion for all things related to university life. As you might expect, a fairly straight-forward story, and the occasional clash with modern mores; but some classic slapstick that works just as well now as it did then made it well worth seeing for me.
The music was especially well suited, and once you got past the initial oddness of having it all come from one place (i.e. the orchestra) rather than from the sound system, it was actually quite fun to be able to glance down and see them beavering away at the score.
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And then my final film of the Festival, Not Quite Hollywood - a documentary about the "Oz-sploitation" genre films of the 70s and 80s. Quentin Tarantino is apparently a huge fan of these films, and for all I've ragged on him in the past here, he is a guy who can convey his passion for things well.
There was plenty of interest going on - they interviewed one of the film critics who lambasted the films at the time (and still doesn't like them), as well as many of the actors and actresses, and the people who actually made the movies; to give you an idea of the sort of guy one of the directors was, they had him sitting in an animal-print chair with a stripper gyrating in the background.
A lot of these movies were about nudity, violence and occasionally gore. There was a definite group of films that took a moderately affectionate poke at the "Ocker" stereotype (and it was implied that the film-makers were sometimes a bit annoyed when the people they were making fun of saw the characters as a tribute, and something to aspire to). And there was definitely a bit of grumpiness that the modern Australian film has to be a historical outback story in order to get funding. And the stunt work that they talked about was recklessly dangerous, pure and simple - they were ridiculously luck that more people weren't killed on the sets.
All in all, an interesting look into a set of films I really don't know very well.
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So, how is it to be back at work? Sadly, I think it's actually less stressful to be at work then to be on leave; while I was away, the spectre of a fatal phone-call was ever-present, and it is several orders of magnitude easier to diagnose and fix problems in person than over the phone. There's also the fact that being at work forced Support to work out what was wrong with my machines, so that I could actually log into various systems; and I'm earning money again, as opposed to spending it on delicious icecreams. Dammit, now I want that yummy Kapiti pear icecream. :)
My team has been moved to one of the satellite sites, which means that the walk to work is a manageable sub-20 minutes, rather than 40+; I've walked to and from work every day bar one, so far. (It would have been every day, but I needed the car to get somewhere after work once.) Being away from the hub makes everyone more mellow, and I'm seeing a bunch of people that I haven't seen since I worked at Rongotai; but on the other hand, you can't pop downstairs and hold the hand (or watch over the shoulder) of someone who is having problems. So far, this hasn't been a huge issue; but I can see that it's going to come up.
Also, it puts me in the same building as someone who keeps finding things that are broken or messy, and who comes and wants me to clean it up; or who just has this question about a database schema; or who would like us to track this, or that, or the other... I mean, he's made plenty of neat tools, and he's a really smart guy, but I think he's popped in every day since he's found out we moved over to his building, which tends to interrupt the flow of whatever you're doing.
Of course, at least once what he interrupted was "watching a online video of little girl climb inside one of those grabber machines to lie on all the stuffed toys inside the case", but he didn't know that when he decided to pop by my desk, instead of sending an email! ;)
Anyway, we don't have much light, but we do have windows, which is more than many of the people in our building can say; and on the whole, it's not too bad to be back at work.
Thanks to what was possibly the slowest No. 2 bus in the world, I arrived at Mechanical Love only moments before it started.
This was a documentary about giving a robots a sense of presence - trying to make humanoid robots less creepy, and therapeutic animal-like companion robots for people in resting homes and the like. There were a lot of interesting points - for example, the animal robots were shaped like baby seals, because most people knew what baby seals looked like, and they were cute, but very few people had actually interacted with one; people were much more critical of cat-shaped robots, because they knew how cats were meant to react. They showed a number of older people interacting with "Paro", as the seal was called, and some of them were very favourable indeed, even though there was some disapproval from other residents and caregivers. In fact, we saw an administrative meeting where some of the caregivers expressed a concern that people would be giving love to something that could not love them back. But others basically said - if it makes them happy, more active and more sociable, where's the harm? But it would be better if the families came more instead, said one of the objectors. The advocate shrugged and agreed.
Given that people can lavish quite a bit of love on plants without these flags being raised (and I'm dubious about any claim of plants loving a person) I think that the whole "loving back" thing is a red herring. I'll admit that I felt a bit weird watching an elderly woman cuddling and crooning to this robot; but I think I felt more awkward and sad by watching a shot of another woman weeping into the shoulder of a rag doll. I think I'm with the more tolerant caretaker - if it helps, where's the harm?
There was also a large chunk of the documentary devoted to Japanese researcher Professor Ishiguro Hiroshi, who has been trying to create a convincing human-like robot - that is, one that gives you a sense that someone is there. This is both an engineering and psychological problem; and I think the engineering part has a way to go yet. When at rest, the robot (or "geminoid", as he wanted to call it, because it was a copy of a real person) looked like a corpse; but in motion, it was even more unnerving, looking at best like someone who had suffered a severe stroke. He had a trial where he got his daughter to come in and have an interview while he controlled the robot; she was initially intrigued, but it was obvious she soon moved to being severely creeped out. His wife had fewer problems with it, but it was heavily implied that they didn't see very much of each other, which Jenni and I both found a bit sad.
I think that if I were involved in this sort of research, I'd probably do video-generated characters, since it would be much easier to get a good range of movement, and people's expectations are lower for video conferencing than for a person sitting in front of them. Then I'd find out what elements are essential in this context for people to be accepted, then use this to guide my engineering efforts.
Interesting stuff from deep in the Uncanny Valley.
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I then went back to Jenni's to say hi to Lee and have a cup of tea, and then went off to the Embassy for Tom Thumb, the old technicolour extravaganza. There were a number of things that wouldn't make the cut today; the Queen of the Forest trying to get her love to kiss her by coyly trying to extract a promise not to kiss her, for example, would quite rightly be re-written to remove the "No means Yes" subtext. And the golliwogs and fat Chinese scholar toy named "Confusion" might well be altered too, though with far less justification; while the Chinese accent was pretty terrible, the toy's role was actually to be a wise adviser.
The actor playing the titular role was surprisingly acrobatic, as well as having quite a bit of dancing to do. I was momentarily thrown by the Boston Brahmin accent of his supposedly dirt-poor mother, and there seemed to be no reason for his toys to come to life other than to give him the opportunity for a couple of song-and-dance numbers; but the villains were suitably theatrically villainous, the fight scene was nicely done, the effects were really impressive for the time (and it was kind of fun to spot some of the artifacts of the techniques they had to use), and I think that children would still enjoy it, though some of the songs might drag for them.
Overall, I'm glad that I went to this.
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I noticed that The Romance of Astrea and Celadon finished half an hour into Shadow of the Holy Book, and I decided that I was more interested in the documentary, so the ticket went to Lee. I'm kinda annoyed at myself, but looking at the schedule, this was probably the hardest day to fit things into.
I'm not convinced I made the right decision. C and I went into Shadow with high hopes, but I should have been warned by the allusion to Michael Moore in the write-up. The documentary was about Turkmenistan, and Morgue's brother's favourite dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, King of All Turkmen, and the extent to which companies attempt to curry favour with this repressive regime, either by translating the dictator's holy book, the Ruhnama, into other languages, or otherwise making it seem like there is favourable commentary in the international community about the dictator and his holy book.
I did learn a fair bit; but I found I was watching the main reporter's abrasive approach to companies and politicians, and thinking to myself that it was no wonder no-one wants to talk to this guy - saying things along the lines of, "How do you justify translating a book and thus supporting a brutal dictator" does not convey an interest in opening up a dialogue, and I can't imagine that many PR people are enthusiastic about being harangued by some Finnish documentary makers that they'd never heard of.
In some ways, it was good that the film-maker's intentions were obvious, front and centre, so that you could see where their biases lay. But I think I would have found simple white text saying something like, "After 85 phone calls over two years, Daimler-Chrysler refused to comment", rather than hearing four or five inconclusive telephone interviews. I would have also been interested in more information - they told us how big these companies are, but gave us no estimation of the worth of the work that they got in Turkmenistan as a result of stroking the dictator's ego. And they talked a lot about the human rights violations, and talked to a large number of exiles; but I don't recall seeing any figures, like "percentage of the population estimated in prison" or "political prisoners versus those who'd be considered criminals in other states", or interviews with distinguished talking heads about the situation, or information about how this guy managed to seize and hold onto power.
It felt shallow; and it was a shame, because it also felt like there was an important story to be told. I'm not a particular fan of the Michael Moore documentary style, so maybe it would work better for someone who was; but I'm left wanting the documentary that this wasn't, and hoping that film I missed was really terrible. ;)
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Finally that night, I watched I Think We're Alone Now, a documentary about two people who are obsessed with Tiffany, in a stalkerish way. One was a guy who had actually gotten a restraining order at one time against him, because he turned up wanting to give her nine white chrysanthemums and a katana as a gesture of honour - her bodyguards weren't that keen on letting the guy near her with a sharp blade. He read the news story about the incident to the camera as if it were a big joke, which was kind of scary in itself; though not as worrying as when he wore the helmet with crystals strapped to it in order to commune telepathically with Tiffany, or when he started talking about how her Playboy photo-shoot was actually her way of telling the world that she was in love with him. One of his friends (who is also a sufferer) mentioned that he has Asperger's Syndrome, and his inability to monitor people's reactions to him as he talked, and talked, and talked certainly bore that out. He certainly didn't come across as a bad man, or at all dangerous; the worst he could be accused of being was tedious, and completely unaware of other's feelings, and you very quickly felt sorry for him.
The other was an intersexed person from a broken home, brought up as female by their mother, and male by their father; they had been male through college (where they claimed they were "the most popular guy in the school"), but had chosen to be female, and conceived of their "inevitable" eventual union with Tiffany as a lesbian one. She had become obsessed after a bike accident where she was in a coma for three days; she claimed that she saw Tiffany in a vision, though she hadn't known who she was, and when the first thing her sister played for her on her walkman was... something by Tiffany, I can't remember, she asked to see a picture of the singer, and then knew that they were destined for each other. There was definitely an element of the "please watch me and be impressed!" that you get with pre-teen kids anxious to be liked; for example, getting the camera to watch her run maybe 30 meters and back, and pantingly claim that this was only maybe 37% of how fast she could go. Her friend also noted that she had a drinking problem and was struggling with depression.
The film-makers allowed the two of them to contact each other, which was nice and awkward, and then they met up in Las Vegas to see a Tiffany concert, which appeared to be in some sort of gay bar. They were both on disability payments, though the first guy seemed to manage his money better; he could afford a car, and to drive there, whereas the other person had to bus. We then saw some information about how the two of them had progressed; the woman seemed to be doing slightly better, and the man... well, he had accepted that he probably wouldn't ever marry Tiffany, but it was less a move forward than a move sideways.
The Lovely Kate was in the audience, and we had a bit of a chat afterwards; she is a teacher, and so talked a bit about her experience with children with Asperger's, how they're bang alongside rote learning (which means that they can pass things if they're appropriately guided), but how some things they find really hard. And we talked a little bit about whether what the film-makers had done was exploitative. In the end, I don't think so - there was no indication that the documentary team were disguising what they were trying to do, and the impression that I get was that the people who were the focus of the documentary would have been satisfied with how they were portrayed.
I guess it comes down to - can it be exploitative if the people affected don't think they're being exploited?
Kate, ever reliable in this regard, asked whether I saw any of myself in the people in the film. I guess an honest answer would be - the reason it was such an uncomfortable documentary was because they kept doing the things that many shy or uncertain people fear they're doing all the time, for example that they're making inappropriate jokes that make others uncomfortable, or that our enthusiasms bore other people, or that we're obviously showing off and look ridiculous, or that the people we think are our bosom buddies are, in their eyes, at best nodding acquaintances. And I guess the fear is not so much that this is true, since I know it'll be true sometimes; it's more that it'll be true, and I won't realise it and be able to stop.
I devoutly hope that it's only true sometimes. :)
I didn't have a chance to write anything during the day, so here are some brief impressions. I likes The Station Agent, so I had hopes that The Visitor would be as good. I think it is, though there's a lot of sadness, too. A university professor who's drifting in his tenure is forced to go to New York to present at a conference; he discovers an immigrant couple living in his apartment, which he hasn't visited for several years. He ends up letting them stay, and... well, I think it's worth watching.
Definitely not action-packed, but a good character piece.
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From Street To Sky is a documentary about Tigilau Ness, front-man for Unity Pacific, rastafarian, former member of the Polynesian Panthers, jailed for protesting the Springbok tour during the Apartheid years, born in NZ of Niuean parents, and father of Che Fu. I like his music, and I liked this documentary, which has plenty of music, and plenty of history. If anything, my only complaint is that it is too short.
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I wish I'd watched Fear(s) of the Dark late at night, or at least in a state of mind more conducive to being creeped out. This was a collection of a number of shorts illustrating things about the dark that four or five authors found scary, animated in a bunch of different styles. Some of them were narrated histories, some were pretty straight ghost stories, some were just creepy sequences with a grinning courtier loosing a vicious dog-pack one by one on various victims, and some were a bunch of abstract shapes with people talking about their fears, anything from death to the fear of becoming bourgeois and conservative.
I liked it, and would like to watch it again when I'm in the right mood for it.
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My third film at the Film Archive was The Cool School, a documentary about the emergence of a Los Angeles art scene during the fifties and sixties. I found it very interesting, even though I don't actually like very much of what is classified as modern art, though some pop art is pretty cool. (I don't think that they're hoodwinking people, or that they're wicked; I'm just don't get pleasure or interest from most of these pieces, and I've got plenty of other things that do interest and please me.) The way that the personalities interacted, the galleries and cliques emerged, and the prejudices of the New York art scene were gradually overcome (or not) were all quite interesting, perhaps moreso because all of the aesthetic judgements were received wisdom for me.
I don't think that I would watch this again, but I don't regret that I saw it.
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Lake Tahoe was by the same person who did Duck Season, so I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting into - lots of long shots, people sitting around and filling time, conversations where important stuff is implied rather than said, and slightly quirky people and situations. In this case, a young man has crashed his family's car, so he walks around town trying to find a garage that's open to help him.
This film is definitely not put together in a standard way, and I could see it being really boring in another person's hands. For example, the camera will often linger on a shot after the character has left the shot; this means that sometimes (but only sometimes) they can come back into shot, with evidence of stuff that's happened out of sight in what they look like or are doing, and other times just serves to emphasise the passing of time. The shot will often fade to black, while the background noise continues, and then it'll fade back up to show the characters in different positions, to indicate time has past; and then do it again another couple of times, to show that they're stuck there for ages.
Another thing that makes the film enjoyable is the humour - the girl in the auto-parts shop hands her baby over, then asks him to hold the baby until it falls asleep, and then gets out her tape deck; she promises to keep the volume down low, but another fade to black and we come back to her rocking out to a pop/punk ballad. Or the kung-fu obsessed young mechanical whizz, or the ageing garage owner who listens to the description of the problem, describes the part that the boy needs, and then sends him to hunt through the junk pile while he goes to lie in his hammock.
While there might not be enough action for some people, I'd happily watch this again.
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I was prepared to be disappointed by Fighter, which Jenni had described to me as Bend It Like Beckham, but with martial arts instead of soccer, and no humour. I agree that it was less fun, but I'm not sure that I agree that made it a worse film. I think that the relationship between the girl and her sifu was good, and I liked the way that the issue of race and religion was there, but not overplayed - the friendship between the main girl (a Muslim of Turkish descent) and the Danish girl felt quite natural, and the scene where a bunch of Scandinavian girls are sitting around, drinking and talking about boyfriends felt a lot more like gentle teasing than prejudice.
Did I enjoy Bend It more? Sure; but I really liked this movie, too.
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Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone was another film I was a bit nervous about - most of what I knew about it was that it eventually has a downer ending, and that it is chock-full of What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic. I thought it was very good looking, as you'd expect for a movie remake, and was fine as a setting-up film, though it would have been nice if something had been resolved.
I will almost certainly go and see the next one.
After dealing with a work crisis, my first movie was The Not Dead, where returned soldiers from the Malay conflict, the Balkans peacekeeping mission and Iraq talk about their experiences and their PSTD (and the difficulties that they had getting help). This was tied together with poems by a guy who had translated their experiences into an anthology.
One of the soldiers, who must be in his seventies (but still can't sleep with his wife because of the nightmares) talked about being a policeman in the 50s, after he came back - an old woman invited him in for a cup of tea, and showed him a picture of her son that she kept in a drawer. She couldn't hang it up, because she cried every time she saw it; he had died in an ambush overseas, and she was wracked with guilt over whether he had suffered terribly before he died. The next day, the ex-soldier came back with pictures; he had been in that ambush, had known her son, and told her that he'd been hit in the head and died instantly (which was a lie, since they'd been shot in the lower half to disable them first). This comforted her, and she was able to hang the picture in pride of place. But what affected the man the most was that she was too poor for carpets, and the contents of the house wouldn't be worth four quid; and the army had taken her son away.
This was a very affecting doco, for all the right reasons. It emphasised to me the need for soldiers to be able to rely on their leaders, not just to put them in harm's way for the right reasons, but to look after them when they come back. I can't imagine what they've gone through and how strong those around them have had to be; we heard about one wife, but actually met the other, and they talked about how traumatic simple things like a child's birthday party could be.
I'm not sure I could watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it then.
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The Orphanage was at the Embassy an hour later, so I grabbed some lunch at Cha, and then headed in. It was basically a ghost story, with a couple and their seven year-old boy coming to set up a small home for special-needs children in a house that was the orphanage that the woman had grown up in. A little gore, but not very much; a number of leap-out scares, and some extended creepiness. I guess whether you believe that it's a happy or sad ending depends on how seriously you take the supernatural elements.
I thought it was quite cool, and given a while I might watch it again.
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I was a bit worried about Waltz With Bashir; I thought there was the distinct potential that I'd either hate it or be bored to tears. As it turned out, it was very good. It echoed some of the themes of The Not Dead in that it dealt with the guilt of surviving soldiers - in this case, Israeli soldiers in the war in Lebanon, with a focus on a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christians, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader.
It was animated until the very end, which meant that they could blend the contemporary images with the reminisces seamlessly, indicating the transition mainly by colour scheme. The main narrator realises that he can't remember certain events, though he has the image of him and a colleague floating naked in the water, flares going up, and returning to the shore to get dressed. He talks to other people in his unit, journalists, and psychologists, to try and get an idea of what happened, why he can't remember, what memories he's created, and what he forgot.
One of his friends tells him - you don't remember these camps from Beirut, you remember them from Auschwitz. (Or something along those lines; I'm not up to quoting directly. :)
I thought it was a good film. I don't think I'd watch it again.
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Frozen River is a nice "unlikely buddy" movie, between a woman with two kids (five and fifteen) whose gambling-addicted husband has just disappeared with the money they need to pay for their new home, and a Mohawk woman whose husband died smuggling people in from Canada, and had her baby taken away from her by her husband's mother. It was a fairly gritty movie; one of the advantages to seeing stuff in the Festival is that, unlike a Hollywood film, there's a chance that the most horrible thing might actually happen, so there is actual tension while you're watching.
I liked it; it wasn't stupendous, but it was well done, and I'd watch it again.
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I then got the slowest fast-food in the known universe (i.e. Burger King), and then met up with C to go to The Wave. Semi-ironically, given that this is a retelling of a high-school social studies experiment in fascism gone horribly awry, there was a Film Society member telling people that they needed to make sure that there weren't any gaps in seating (which was fine) which progressed to telling people where to sit (to the extent that was kinda unnecessary).
I remember reading the original American book in secondary school, and I believe that it's been made into a film before, so there weren't many surprises. They do a good job of showing a bunch of different responses - the rich kid who leaves, but drifts back when he sees it's an opportunity to control people; the people trapped in social roles that find that they can change how people see them; the bored who find direction, and the outcast who finds people defending them because they're part of the group. And they make it clear how swiftly things can get out of control.
One of the advantages to setting the film in Germany is that they got to compare and contrast them with the Anarchists, who were depicted as basically just another punk gang, happy to use violence against those who appeared weaker and/or challenged them. The film heavily implied that this wasn't a better solution.
I think that one of the interesting things that they touched on, but didn't really answer, is the positive aspects of autocracy/fascism. One of the unfortunate truths is that not only the leaders, but followers get things out of these kind of groups - a sense of unity, mutual support, the joy of being in a group all pointed in the same direction. But the problem with creating an "in" group is you automatically create an "out" group.
But... what about the people who, when they think for themselves, think just of themselves? There's probably no good answer for that.
I guess that fascism gives you fast results - very much like a sugar rush. But just like a sugar rush, it's not something that sustains - you either have to keep on dosing (which leads to a bunch of regrettable side-effects), or you crash. True consensus-building might be slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's much more likely to give you long-term sustained enthusiasm and momentum, even when the "leaders" aren't pushing. Like, er, brown rice? I seem to have lost track of my metaphor.
Anyway, as a movie, it wasn't revelatory, nor as shocking as I was actually expecting. But I think it's a movie that's worth remaking every so often, so that the message of how easy it is to drift into this sort of behaviour gets reiterated.